When Nick Sloane, a seasoned salvage operator published his plan of guiding icebergs from Antarctica to Cape Town to solve the city’s acute water problem; many people thought it was a far-fetched idea. It didn’t help that the first story was released in Sunday newspapers close to April fool’s day. Cape Town’s authorities did not want to bite either. But since then; he has managed to get the scientific community behind him. It has helped him to refine his models and Sloane now has the support of a number of scientists as well as the backing of the Water Research Commission. If anybody can achieve this, it is probably Sloane. When Western European salvagers battled to get the Costa Concordia that ran aground off the Italian coast because the captain was apparently making googly eyes at his Moldovan girlfriend instead of watching out for rocks; a team led by Sloane managed to re-float the cruise ship. In an interview with Biznews, Sloane said his ‘Iceberg to Cape Town’ idea is gaining traction. – Linda van Tilburg
The Antarctic icebergs that Sloane is targeting look like your standard dining room table, there is about eight to ten stories of iceberg above the waterline and about seventy-three to seventy-five stories of iceberg below the waterline, basically the length of the Shard building in London. The Antarctic icebergs are ancient, it takes them 300 to 1,000 years to fracture where they land in the Southern Ocean adding about 2,000 billion tons of fresh water as they melt. “That’s enough for mankind”, Sloane says. About 5-7% of the bergs are suitable to be towed to Cape Town and they can be found a couple of hundred kilometres off Gough island.
The position of the Cape is according to Sloane, the ideal place on earth to transport icebergs to. The only other suitable places are Freemantle in Perth, Australia and Santiago in Chile. They all have cold currents that come up their West coasts and the icebergs are in the right place in the Southern Ocean from where they can be guided up to land.

Sloane says since floating the idea in 2017, support among the scientific community has been growing. He said he had “interesting feedback in May from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in America, which is affiliated with MIT. They ran a 1,000 simulations and could not find any error in the plan and methodology.” Sloane says the scientific community is starting to believe; it can be done.
The South African salvager and his backers, which includes French engineer Georges Moughin, the technical director of Iceberg Transport International, Norwegian glaciologist, Prof Olav Orheim and South African engineer, Dr Mike Shand are currently speaking to investors. Whereas Cape Town was not interested when the idea was originally flouted, South Africa’s Water Research Institute are “very excited” saying it should be looked at in more detail because it is an alternative source of water. The commission has arranged for Sloane and his team to give a presentation to the Minister for Water and Sanitation, Lindiwe Sisulu.
The scale of what they are trying to achieve, is incredible. The icebergs weigh about 80 million tons and are roughly 850m to 1,000m long and between 40-50m long. They all have the same depth. The icebergs move from west to east in the Southern Ocean days. What Sloane and his team would try to do, is to steer them to keep going north. They plan to guide them and run them aground in the Old Berg River Valley. He says it is not used by fishermen as they say there are no fish in the area.

Once it runs aground, they plan to give the iceberg a thermal barrier in the sub-water portion and to harvest the water on top. The natural melt rate is calculated at about 60 million litres a day, which the team will increase. Sloane and his team believe they can harvest 70% of the iceberg that will provide around 15 billion litres of water, enough for Cape Town for a whole year. The iceberg water is expected to be delivered at 5 cents a litre and will be more expensive than rainwater, which is about 2 cents a litre, but “it’s a lot cheaper than the penalty rate that home owners were paying” in 2018 during the drought in Cape Town.
Another commercial value that the icebergs present is bottling the water and selling it as a novelty product. The water is ancient, purer than anything else on earth and contains vitamins and minerals. Sloane believes there might be a market for bottled water for about 5% of the water. He is confident that towing icebergs to Cape Town could become a reality in three to five years and that in 20 to 30 years it will be “pretty common” in the southern nations.
In the longer term, there is also the possibility of supplying Namibia and Southern Angola with water. Cape Town managed to ward off Day Zero; the day that the city would have ran out of water but Sloane believes the trend is decreasing rainfall and increasing populations for the western parts of South Africa and his iceberg plan could bring long term water safety to the Western Cape.